Tooway or not tooway>

Getting lots of publicity from Tooway, and despite the costs (£25/month) I am beginning to think it is going to be worth it as our exchange (01458 Meare Heath) is over a mile away and that's another five miles from Glastonbury, so any BDUK money coming to Somerset is not going to get to us any time soon. FTTC is probably a pipe dream for us.

I'm currently getting 1.2 megs on a good day. Videos and iplayer can be painful; web pages can take a while to load.

So advice welcome, especially on
1) Will web surfing be any worse than it is now (people seem to say pages take a while to load from satellite...?
2) Any views on who the best contractors are to go with?
3) Will my neighbours trees prevent the signal getting to a dish on my SSE-facing wall...?

I work with Sat broadband, although not consumer stuff and not Eutelsat, still Ka band.

The "issue" is that with the sat being 22,000 miles away, your optimal possible ping is 550ms or so. For web browsing it isn't really an issue in my opinion, it takes half a second longer for the page to commence loading, but then it loads just as quick.

iPlayer is likewise fine, and surprisingly so is VoIP, you don't actually notice the delay (I guess it doesn't seem weird for the other person to take half a second to say something...)

Of course, online gaming for FPS games sucks. Turn based stuff like Civ is fine.

Don't forget, you don't need a phone line, so that £25/m is more like £15.

Edited by nemeth782 (Fri 28-Jun-13 23:30:47)

1Mbps ADSL will seem more responsive for browsing unless there is a large image/video to load.

I would advise against getting the lowest satellite broadband package, the usage is only 10GB and therefore you would still be able to download a lot more on your 1Mbps ADSL... it'll just take longer (unless you also have a usage cap).

If you can get Satellite TV then you can get Satellite broadband, the satellites are in a similar direction. Remember the signal is coming from the Sky and therefore unless the tree is very close and tall it shouldn't be a problem.

I had the Tooway service (via Avonline) installed mid - May.

Went for the unlimited package. Yes its pricey but I have NO BB connection via the phone available.

Again I live in a BDUK area and the contract with BT has been signed but all advice is that nothing will happen for at least 12 months.

I've had no problems at all excepting the latency which is not an issue for me.

There HAVE been times when it has slowed to ~ 3Mbps and I understand from other information I have gleaned that Tooway are as susceptible to those individuals who hammer their connections 24/7 downloading (allegedly) every Linux distro on a daily basis :>)

I use the Tooway service through Avonline (as they were the cheapest). I have the unlimited version and use it for work to send large video files to clients to approve - and my wife uses the download speed for iPlayer etc. You will find general web browsing a little frustrating because of the very high latency with the data signal - probably similar to the delay you might get with a 512kbps - 1Mbps connection.

For web surfing I use a cheap adsl 2Mbps connection. (My street in Exeter has no cable or fibre.)

For downloading and uploading files though, Tooway is excellent and rock solid and I've had no problems with speed issues.

The Ka satellite is at 9 degrees East which is slightly higher and to the right of the Sky satellites. If you have an iphone there are a few free augmented reality satellite finder apps you can download to check if you have line of sight or not.

Just spotted a thread in the "ISP unhappiness" forum re: Avonline / Tooway /Skylogic whihc makes me very nervous about signing up with Tooway.
ISP unhappiness - Tooway etc

heres the latest speed test:

Last Result:
Download Speed: 3568 kbps (446 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 5665 kbps (708.1 KB/sec transfer rate)
Latency: 722 ms
Jitter: 70 ms
Packet Loss: -1%
28 July 2013 14:50:40 BST

For the 3rd day running my speeds have been riddiculously slow i dont see how they can have throttled me back because of using 60gb data ive only had the system installed for a week and unless im downloading every movie in the known universe i cant see how i can have used that in a one week period.

These slow speeds are really stupid. my rx and tx levels remain unchanged since the system was installed so its not as if im losing signal along the way.

i want to know how i can end my contract with avonline and get a different satellite provider possibly SES broadband from astra as im sick to death of paying £65 per month for a service with speeds that are no better than BT ADSL because they are making 'guarantee's' about speeds, value and technology which are a load of rubbish. the speeds are rubbish, the value is extortionate and the technology cant handle the amount of traffic being put through it.

Yes, satellite will be bad for web browsing. Latency average is around 650ms, sometimes a lot higher e.g. 1000ms if busy, with 550ms quoted as absolute minimum.

Generally web pages are composed of many small files, each of which have to be requested and loaded. So speed isn't usually a limiting factor, latency of each request is. If you need to do 100 requests to load a page but only 3.3MB of data needs to be loaded then having a high minimum ping will cripple your loading times more than limited bandwidth.

Example web page bbc.co.uk broken down into requests:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/flhhA/bbc.co.uk

If you put your mouse pointer on each coloured bar you can see the ms times it took for each operation, like looking up the domain name, connecting or loading the data.

A lot of operations will happen in parallel but whenever they don't 650ms is a large hit to take.

Satellite will be good for streaming video as once the stream is requested it can just keep sending the data without waiting for a response. Though forward/rewind might be a bit tedious.

So keep your ADSL for web browsing and perhaps get satellite for streaming and/or downloading e.g. movie/tv files. 20mbit is more than enough for all the streaming sites.

You'll usually only use the full bandwidth when downloading because streams are often limited to lower bit rates.

A compromise would be 3G/4G mobile, if you can get a good signal. You get semi-decent latency and better speeds than ADSL. So it would have the advantages of both.

Edited by deleted (Thu 01-Aug-13 07:50:24)

I work wih Broadband Satellite Broadband and there is an app you can get for an android phone or Iphone hat will enable you to see were the satellite would be best places..they can even be mounted on the ground.The app is a really usefull tool if you are thinking of getting saellite Broadband.

I thought the satellite would be best placed in the sky?